Tag: garlic festival

The weather may have been mild, but the cook-off stage was hot this weekend when Rebecka Evans, of Danville won first place in the Gilroy Garlic Festival’s famed Great Garlic Cook-Off challenge.Evans, 56, squared off against seven other finalists from all over the country on July 30, when she secured the crown and a $5,000 first-place prize with her garlic goat cheese bacon soufflé with creamy garlic mustard sauce.“I am thrilled. This is a top competition among food competitors. All of us want to be part of this,” said Evans.Cloves of the pungent bulb were sliced, minced, sauteed, baked and fried by contestants—each submitted an original recipe containing at least six cloves of garlic.Evans, who keeps a food blog “At Home with Rebecka,” is no stranger in the kitchen or on the stage—she was a professional opera singer for 15 years and has been participating in the competitive cooking circuit since she was 25.“I love competing and I love food sport,” said Evans.In 2015 alone, Evans placed in several food competitions, including World Food Championships for both bacon and seafood, earning “Fourth in The World” and first runner-up titles, respectively.Marcie Morrow, co-chair of this year’s cook-off committee said she loves the whole process of the competition.The recipes are indulgent and each year 20 of the entries are selected and prepared as part of the decision process in naming the final eight.“Just reading the recipes, you gain five pounds,” said Morrow.“That’s one of the bonuses. It’s getting to cook and be part of the selection process and then being able to call the people that have entered and tell them that they are a semi-finalist for this competition. That’s exciting too,” Morrow said.  The cook-off stage is in constant motion, with each of the eight contestants assisted by their volunteer ‘chaperone’ to prepare their original recipe. Each begins at 15-minute intervals and has two hours to prepare their dish for the judges.Dawn Davis, Morrow’s co-chair, said the best part of working as a committee member for her is the excitement.“It’s fun. The contestants—the amateur cooks on Saturdays are so excited to be here. The judges are excited to be here,” said Davis.Second-place winner and regular food competitor Veronica Callaghan of Glastonbury, Connecticut, was crowned and awarded $2,500 for her roasted garlic pizza with spicy rosemary caramelized onions, figs and bacon.Joanne Robinson, local artist and mother of the Garlic Queen, Kyle Perez-Robinson, sat on stage as a VIP in honor of her artistic contributions to the contest—the artwork on the aprons. Robinson tried Callaghan’s pizza and said it was amazing.“The caramelization of the pizza crust was super good. It was really the best pizza I think I’ve ever had,” said Robinson.The last award of $1,000 and the third place crown of garlic cloves and flowers was given to Kelly Velasco of American Fork, Utah. Velasco said she’s been cooking all of her life and she loves it—especially making risotto. Velasco placed with her garlic risotto stuffed mussels with garlic herb toast. Her husband, Frank Velasco, said he fell in love with his wife’s cooking. “Her asparagus risotto is what she gave me when we were dating. That’s what captured my heart.”Evans said because you can’t always control the conditions, soufflés can be hard to pull off. She feels part of her success in competitions is finding a new dish. “Look at past year entries. Look for things not done before,” said Evans.

Cal Fire captain Herb Alpers was in quite a bind leading into Friday’s inaugural Champions for Charity first responders cook-off at the 2016 Gilroy Garlic Festival.Only days away from the competition, which pitted four first responder tandems from different agencies against one another in a three-course elimination format, Alpers needed to find a new partner. His fellow fire captain Anthony Anastasi was forced to bow out due the all-hands-on-deck scenario brought on by the 35,000-plus acre Soberanos fire burning in Monterey County.So, at the last minute, Alpers leaned on a retired firefighter Tom Evans to join him on the festival’s Cook-off Stage to battle for the $3,000 top prize to be donated to the charity of their choosing.The makeshift Cal Fire duo found instant chemistry in the kitchen and pulled off a victory for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the recipient of the charitable donation made by the Gilroy Garlic Festival Foundation on their behalf.“It was a little more pressure than I’m used to cooking in the firehouse. We had to think quick on our feet,” said Alpers, a 20-year veteran of Cal Fire who remained calm cooking on stage in front of a live audience. “We were so busy cooking and keeping track of time that we didn’t realize our surroundings. All I could focus on was the task at hand.”Two hours earlier, Gene Sakahara and Sam Bozzo, the famed “SakaBozzo” duo of local retired administrators and past Garlic Festival presidents, donned the same Cook-off stage for their final cooking demonstration along with their grandsons.The first responder teams were tested with a surprise basket of ingredients for each of the two rounds, cooking an entree in the opener and a dessert in the finale. It was originally supposed to be a three round competition, including an appetizer, but the Gilroy Fire Department cookoff team was forced to withdraw due to the fire as well.The two other competing teams were paramedics Peggy Brapp and TC Warford from Santa Clara County EMS (playing for nonprofit “19 For Life”) and fire engineer Vince Grewohl and fire fighter Bill Olguin from the Hollister Fire Department (playing for Chamberlain’s Children Center).“When I’m on duty, I cook 90 percent of the time. I love Italian food, but I cook a little bit of everything (at the fire station),” shared Olguin prior to the first round basket being revealed. “Usually it’s what’s on sale; we all chip in for dinner; and there’s a lot of experimenting.”In the opening round, which teams had a half hour to make into tasty dish, the ingredients revealed in the basket (just like on the Food Network’s “Chopped” program) were chicken thighs, pickled garlic, artichokes and hot sauce. While Cal Fire and Hollister Fire made their own concoctions of sautéed chicken with pasta, County EMS produced a Greek lemon chicken with artichokes.“I feel like Gordon Ramsey but not as mean,” said celebrity judge Alexis Higgins, a contestant on Season 3 of Fox’s Master Chef Jr. show, as she tasted the three entrees. “Everyone had real creative dishes and you could really taste the garlic.”The three-judge panel, which also included executive chefs Danae McLaughlin from Harker Schools in San Jose and Benjamin Brown from The Lodge at Pebble Beach, used a points system to determine which teams advanced and the eventual champion.“It was really close and we just hate doing this,” said McLaughlin before Hollister Fire’s duo was eliminated in the entree round.In the 20-minute championship dessert round, the secret basket ingredients chosen were ladyfingers, blood orange cranberry punch, bacon and, of course, more garlic.The victorious Cal Fire squad served up a lady finger, custard, fresh fruit, candy bacon parfait, while Cal EMS made a concoction they called “Bloody fingers” with a Greek yogurt, tart dipping sauce.“I was really pleased with the balance of bacon and garlic in both dishes,” McLaughlin said. “Both pulled off incredible desserts.”In the end, Cal Fire’s dessert was the winning dish in the inaugural Champions For Charity event.

The 38th annual Gilroy Garlic Festival has come and gone, and while attendance numbers are down over last year’s, organizers say they should still be on track to reaching $11 million in donations over the lifetime of the event.

Don Christopher, the founder of the country’s biggest garlic producer, Christopher Ranch, started 60 years ago in Gilroy with 12 acres of the spicy bulb, sandwiched between his main crops, lima beans and sugar beets.  The man who was then known as the king of garlic, Joe Gubser, asked Christopher to plant some bulbs for him. He sold the garlic to Gubser for 9 cents a pound.

There’s somewhat of an urban legend that firefighters are the best cooks, even if it’s just meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy. But now a pair of local fire stations are being put to the test on Friday when it participates in the first-ever Champions for Charity cook-off at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Friday at 2 p.m.

Sherry Harig, this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival Art Poster contest winner, has her plane ticket in hand and is eagerly anticipating her upcoming trip to Gilroy.

It was during the fall of 1992 when Gene Sakahara and Gene Bozzo were called in at the last minute to replace Rudy Melone, Garlic Festival co-founder, for a cooking demonstration at the Nob Hill Foods Hecker Pass Family Adventure Park.A year later, when they made their way to the cooking stage for the first time as SakaBozzo, the comedic culinary duo were a hit with the crowd. This Friday will mark the 25th appearance at the festival for these Gilroy residents.But the sad part is it’s also going to be their final show.“We thought that we had a good run at it,” Sakahara said. “We want to go off while we’re still welcomed and then give other people a chance at it.”The show might be done with after this week, however Sakahara, 68, and Bozzo, 75, plan to be part of the garlic festival in a more low key situation.“The festival is in both of our bloods,” Bozzo said. “We believe in the festival. We believe what good it does for the community and we’re just moving over to another assignment. That’s all.”This year the two former garlic festival presidents are adding their grandsons to the show. Bozzo will have his grandson Dominic, 8, accompany him, while Sakahara will bring up his grandsons Bode, 10, and Kiden Gonzales, 9.“That’ll be fun because we’ve always tried to portray cooking for the family,” Sakahara said. “That’s what we’re about, is family. And we really enjoy the meals together.”Sakahara and Bozzo are known to mix it up year after year with new recipes that include garlic and this year will be no different. Sakahara will make Mendocino crab cakes with Bode and Kiden. Bozzo will make southern Italian red sauce with pork and Dominic will make a family recipe known as Carmela’s Meatballs.Bozzo said the inspiration for SakaBozzo came from someone he watched at the festival, but it wasn’t quite the vision he wanted to model the show after.“He cooked the same thing every year,” Bozzo said “People kind of got tired of that. We never did that, every year was a different recipe.”The SakaBozzo show was also all about cooking for the family and over the years the Gilroy Garlic Festival became a big family to them.Bozzo said they both have strong beliefs in cooking with family and friends. Nowadays, he said, people are always on the go and don’t have time for a family meal.What started as a friendly favor to substitute for an ill friend quickly turned into a success for the SakaBozzo show. They have been asked to make a special appearance at the 40th annual garlic fest in 2018 and they agreed without hesitation.“We’ll still be involved but not on the cook-off stage every year,” Sakahara said “But it’ll be good to just relax a little bit too.”

I love living in Gilroy. We’ve got the natural beauty of open space (for now, anyway), mountains all around us, an extremely friendly community, the Premium Outlets and best of all, a dozen or so awesome wineries right in our very own backyard.

Dressed in his puffy white costume, his cowboy hat decorated with garlic bulbs and wearing his trademark Birkenstocks, he strolls through the grounds of Christmas Hill Park, and everywhere he goes, choruses of, “Hey it’s the Garlic Dude,” are shouted by children and adults alike.